also we transfer to His character, from our own, justice and charity. In
man they are virtues: in God, His attributes. What is in us the
laborious conquest of liberty, is in Him His very nature. The idea of
the right, and the respect paid to the right, are signs of the dignity
of our existence. If respect of rights is the very essence of justice,
the Perfect Being must know and respect the rights of the lowest of His
creatures; for He assigned them those rights. In God resides a sovereign
justice, that renders to every one what is due him, not according to
deceitful appearances, but according to the truth of things. And if man,
a limited being, has the power to go out of himself, to forget his own
person, to love another like himself, and devote himself to his
happiness, dignity, and perfection, the Perfect Being must have, in an
infinite degree, that disinterested tenderness, that Charity, the
Supreme Virtue of the human person. There is in God an infinite
tenderness for His creatures, manifested in His giving us existence,
which He might have withheld; and every day it appears in innumerable
marks of His Divine Providence.
Plato well understood that love of God, and expresses it in these great
words: "Let us speak of the cause which led the Supreme Arranger of the
Universe to produce and regulate that Universe. He was good; and he who
is good has no kind of ill-will. Exempt from that, He willed that
created things should be, as far as possible, like Himself." And
Christianity in its turn said, "_God has so loved men that He has given
them His only Son_."
It is not correct to affirm, as is often done, that Christianity has in
some sort _discovered_ this noble sentiment. We must not lower human
nature, to raise Christianity. Antiquity knew, described, and practised
charity; the first feature of which, so touching, and thank God! so
common, is goodness, as its loftiest one is heroism. Charity is devotion
to another; and it is ridiculously senseless to pretend that there ever
was an age of the world, when the human soul was deprived of that part
of its heritage, the power of devotion. But it is certain that
Christianity has diffused and popularized this virtue, and that, before
Christ, these words were never spoken: "LOVE ONE ANOTHER; FOR THAT IS
THE WHOLE LAW." _Charity_ presupposes _Justice_. He who truly loves his
brother respects the rights of his brother; but he does more, he forgets
his own. Egoism _sells_ or _takes_. Love delights in _giving_. In God,
love is what it is in us; but in an infinite degree. God is
inexhaustible in His charity, as He is inexhaustible in His essence.
That Infinite Omnipotence and Infinite Charity, which, by an admirable
good-will, draws from the bosom of its immense love the favors which it
incessantly bestows on the world and on humanity, teaches us that the
more we give, the more we possess.
God being all just and all good, He can will nothing but what is good
and just. Being Omnipotent, whatever He wills He can do, and
consequently does. The world is the work of God: it is therefore
perfectly made.
Yet there is disorder in the world, that seems to impugn the justice and
goodness of God.
A principle indissolubly connected with the very idea of good, tells us
that every moral agent deserves reward when he does well, and punishment
when he does ill. This principle is universal and necessary. It is
absolute. If it does not apply in this world, it is false, or the world
is badly ordered.
But good actions are not always followed by happiness, nor evil ones by
misery. Though often this fact is more apparent than real; though
virtue, a war against the passions, full of dignity but full of sorrow
and pain, has the latter as its condition, yet the pains that follow
vice are greater; and virtue conduces most to health, strength, and long
life;--though the peaceful conscience that accompanies virtue creates
internal happiness; though public opinion generally decides correctly on
men's characters, and rewards virtue with esteem and consideration, and
vice with contempt and infamy; and though, after all, justice reigns in
the world, and the surest road to happiness is still that of virtue, yet
there are exceptions. Virtue is not always rewarded, nor vice punished,
in this life.
The data of this problem are these: 1st. The principle of merit and
demerit within us is absolute: every good action _ought_ to be rewarded,
every bad one punished: 2d. God is just as He is all-powerful: 3d. There
are in this world particular cases, contradicting the necessary and
universal law of merit and demerit. What is the result?
To reject the two principles, that God is just, and the law of merit and
demerit absolute, is to raze to the foundations the whole edifice of
human faith.
To maintain them, is to admit that the present life is to be terminated
or continued elsewhere. The moral person who acts well or ill, and
awaits reward or punishment, is connected with a body, lives with it,
makes use of it, depends upon it in a measure, but is not _it_. The
_body_ is composed of parts. It diminishes or increases, it is divisible
even to infinity. But this _something_ which has a consciousness of
itself, and says "I, ME"; that feels itself free and responsible, feels
too that it is incapable of division, that it is a being _one_ and
_simple_; that the ME cannot be halved, that if a limb is cut off and
thrown away, no part of the ME goes with it: that it remains identical
with itself under the variety of phenomena which successively manifest
it. This identity, indivisibility, and absolute unity of the person, are
its _spirituality_, the very essence of the person. It is not in the
least an hypothesis to affirm that the soul differs essentially from the
body. By the soul we mean _the person_, not separated from the
consciousness of the attributes which constitute it,--_thought_ and
_will_. The Existence without consciousness is an abstract being, and
not a person. It is _the person_, that is _identical, one, simple_. Its
attributes, developing it, do not divide it. Indivisible, it is
indissoluble, and, may be immortal. If absolute justice requires this
immortality, it does not require what is impossible. The spirituality of
the soul is the condition and necessary foundation of immortality: the
law of merit and demerit the direct demonstration of it. The first is
the metaphysical, the second the moral proof. Add to these the tendency
of all the powers of the soul toward the Infinite, and the principle of
final causes, and the proof of the immortality of the soul is complete.
God, therefore, in the Masonic creed, is INFINITE TRUTH, INFINITE
BEAUTY, INFINITE GOODNESS. He is the Holy of Holies, as Author of the
Moral Law, as the PRINCIPLE of Liberty, of Justice, and of Charity,
Dispenser of Reward and Punishment. Such a God is not an abstract God;
but an intelligent and free _person_, Who has made us in His image, from
Whom we receive the law that presides over our destiny, and Whose
judgment we await. It is His love that inspires us in _our_ acts of
charity: it is His justice that governs _our_ justice, and that of
society and the laws. We continually remind ourselves that He is
infinite; because otherwise we should degrade His nature: but He would
be for us as if He were not, if His infinite nature had not forms
inherent in ourselves, the forms of our own reason and soul.
When we love Truth, Justice, and Nobility of Soul, we should know that
it is God we love underneath these special forms, and should unite them
all into one great act of total piety. We should feel that we go in and
out continually in the midst of the vast forces of the Universe, which
are only the Forces of God; that in our studies, when we attain a truth,
we confront the thought of God; when we learn the right, we learn the
will of God laid down as a rule of conduct for the Universe; and when we
feel disinterested love, we should know that we partake the feeling of
the Infinite God. Then, when we reverence the mighty cosmic force, it
will not be a blind Fate in an Atheistic or Pantheistic world, but the
Infinite God, that we shall confront and feel and know. Then we shall be
mindful of the mind of God, conscious of God's conscience, sensible of
His sentiments, and our own existence will be in the infinite being of
God.
The world is a whole, which has its harmony; for a God who is One, could
make none but a complete and harmonious work. The harmony of the
Universe responds to the unity of God, as the indefinite quantity is the
defective sign of the infinitude of God. To say that the Universe is
God, is to admit the world only, and deny God. Give it what name you
please, it is atheism at bottom. On the other hand, to suppose that the
Universe is void of God, and that He is wholly apart from it, is an
insupportable and almost impossible abstraction. To distinguish is not
to separate. I distinguish, but do not separate myself from my qualities
and effects. So God is not the Universe, although He is everywhere
present in spirit and in truth.
To us, as to Plato, absolute truth is in God. It is God Himself under
one of His phases. In God, as their original, are the immutable
principles of reality and cognizance. In Him things receive at once
their existence and their intelligibility. It is by participating in the
Divine reason that our own reason possesses something of the Absolute.
Every judgment of reason envelopes a necessary truth, and every
necessary truth supposes the necessary Existence.
Thus, from every direction,--from metaphysics, aesthetics, and morality
above all, we rise to the same Principle, the common centre, and
ultimate foundation of all truth, all beauty, all good. The True, the
Beautiful, the Good, are but diverse revelations of one and the same
Being. Thus we reach the threshold of religion, and are in communion
with the great philosophies which all proclaim a God; and at the same
time with the religions which cover the earth, and all repose on the
sacred foundation of natural religion; of that religion which reveals to
us the natural light given to all men, without the aid of a particular
revelation. So long as philosophy does not arrive at religion, it is
below all worships, even the most imperfect; for they at least give man
a Father, a Witness, a Consoler, a Judge. By religion, philosophy
connects itself with humanity, which, from one end of the world to the
other, aspires to God, believes in God, hopes in God. Philosophy
contains in itself the common basis of all religious beliefs; it, as it
were, borrows from them their principle, and returns it to them
surrounded with light, elevated above uncertainty, secure against all
attack.
From the necessity of His Nature, the Infinite Being must create and
preserve the Finite, and to the Finite must, in its forms, give and
communicate of His own kind. We cannot conceive of any finite thing
existing without God, the Infinite basis and ground thereof; nor of God
existing without something. God is the necessary logical condition of a
world, its necessitating cause; a world, the necessary logical condition
of God, His necessitated consequence. It is according to His Infinite
Perfection to create, and then to preserve and bless whatever He
creates. That is the conclusion of modern metaphysical science. The
stream of philosophy runs down from Aristotle to Hegel, and breaks off
with this conclusion: and then again recurs the ancient difficulty. If
it be of His nature to create,--if we cannot conceive of His existing
_alone_, without creating, without _having_ created, then what He
created was co-existent with Himself. If He could exist an instant
without creating, He could as well do so for a myriad of eternities.
And so again comes round to us the old doctrine of a God, the Soul of
the Universe, and co-existent with it. For what He created had a
_beginning_; and however long since that creation occurred, an eternity
had before elapsed. The difference between _a_ beginning and _no_
beginning is infinite.
But of some things we can be certain. We are conscious of ourselves--of
ourselves if not as substances, at least as Powers to be, to do, to
suffer. We are conscious of ourselves not as self-originated at all or
as self-sustained alone; but only as dependent, first for existence,
ever since for support.
Among the primary ideas of consciousness, that are inseparable from it,
the atoms of self-consciousness, we find the idea of God. Carefully
examined by the scrutizing intellect, it is the idea of God as infinite,
perfectly powerful, wise, just, loving, holy; absolute being with no
limitation. This made us, made all, sustains us, sustains all; made our
body, not by a single act, but by a series of acts extending over a vast
succession of years,--for man's body is the resultant of all created
things,--made our spirit, our mind, conscience, affections, soul, will,
appointed for each its natural mode of action, set each at its several
aim. Thus self-consciousness leads us to consciousness of God, and at
last to consciousness of an infinite God. That is the highest evidence
of our own existence, and it is the highest evidence of His.
If there is a God at all, He must be omnipresent in space. Beyond the
last Stars He must be, as He is here. There can be no mote that peoples
the sunbeams, no little cell of life that the microscope discovers in
the seed-sporule of a moss, but He is there.
He must also be omnipresent in time. There was no second of time before
the Stars began to burn, but God was in that second. In the most distant
nebulous spot in Orion's belt, and in every one of the millions that
people a square inch of limestone, God is alike present. He is in the
smallest imaginable or even unimaginable portion of time, and in every
second of its most vast and unimaginable volume; His Here conterminous
with the All of Space, His Now coeval with the All of Time.
Through all this Space, in all this Time, His Being extends, spreads
undivided, operates unspent; God in all His infinity, perfectly
powerful, wise, just, loving, and holy. His being is an infinite
activity, a creating, and so a giving of Himself to the World. The
World's being is a _becoming_, a being created and continued. It is so
now, and was so, incalculable and unimaginable millions of ages ago.
All this is philosophy, the unavoidable conclusion of the human mind. It
is not the _opinion_ of Coleridge and Kant, but their _science_; not
what they _guess_, but what they _know_.
In virtue of this in-dwelling of God in matter, we say that the world is
a revelation of Him, its existence a show of His. He is _in_ His work.
The manifold action of the Universe is only His mode of operation, and
all material things are in communion with Him. All grow and move and
live in Him, and by means of Him, and only so. Let Him withdraw from the
space occupied by anything, and it ceases to be. Let Him withdraw any
quality of His nature from anything, and it ceases to be. All must
partake of Him, He dwelling in each, and yet transcending all.
The failure of fanciful religion to become philosophy, does not preclude
philosophy from coinciding with true religion. Philosophy, or rather its
object, the divine order of the Universe, is the intellectual guide
which the religious sentiment needs; while exploring the real relations
of the finite, it obtains a constantly improving and self-correcting
measure of the perfect law of the Gospel of Love and Liberty, and a
means of carrying into effect the spiritualism of revealed religion. It
establishes law, by ascertaining its terms; it guides the spirit to see
its way to the amelioration of life and the increase of happiness. While
religion was stationary, science could not walk alone; when both are
admitted to be progressive, their interests and aims become identified.
Aristotle began to show how religion may be founded on an intellectual
basis; but the basis he laid was too narrow. Bacon, by giving to
philosophy a definite aim and method, gave it at the same time a safer
and self-enlarging basis. Our position is that of intellectual beings
surrounded by limitations; and the latter being constant, have to
intelligence the practical value of laws, in whose investigation and
application consists that seemingly endless career of intellectual and
moral progress which the sentiment of religion inspires and ennobles.
The title of Saint has commonly been claimed for those whose boast it
has been to despise philosophy yet faith will stumble and sentiment
mislead, unless knowledge be present, in amount and quality sufficient
to purify the one and to give beneficial direction to the other.
Science consists of those matured inferences from experience which all
other experience confirms. It is no fixed system superior to revision,
but that progressive mediation between ignorance and wisdom in part
conceived by Plato, whose immediate object is happiness, and its impulse
the highest kind of love. Science realizes and unites all that was truly
valuable in both the old schemes of mediation; the heroic, or system of
action and effort; and the mystical theory of spiritual, contemplative
communion. "Listen to me," says Galen, "as to the voice of the
Eleusinian Hierophant, and believe that the study of nature is a mystery
no less important than theirs, nor less adapted to display the wisdom
and power of the Great Creator. Their lessons and demonstrations were
obscure, but ours are clear and unmistakable."
To science we owe it that no man is any longer entitled to consider
himself the central point around which the whole Universe of life and
motion revolves--the immensely important individual for whose
convenience and even luxurious ease and indulgence the whole Universe
was made. On one side it has shown us an infinite Universe of stars and
suns and worlds at incalculable distances from each other, in whose
majestic and awful presence we sink and even our world sinks into
insignificance; while, on the other side, the microscope has placed us
in communication with new worlds of organized livings beings, gifted
with senses, nerves, appetites, and instincts, in every tear and in
every drop of putrid water.
Thus science teaches us that we are but an infinitesimal portion of a
great whole, that stretches out on every side of us, and above and below
us, infinite in its complications, and which infinite wisdom alone can
comprehend. Infinite wisdom has arranged the infinite succession of
beings, involving the necessity of birth, decay, and death, and made the
loftiest virtues possible by providing those conflicts, reverses,
trials, and hardships, without which even their names could never have
been invented.
Knowledge is convertible into power, and axioms into rules of utility
and duty. Modern science is social and communicative. It is moral as
well as intellectual; powerful, yet pacific and disinterested; binding
man to man as well as to the Universe; filling up the details of
obligation, and cherishing impulses of virtue, and, by affording clear
proof of the consistency and identity of all interests, substituting
co-operation for rivalry, liberality for jealousy, and tending far more
powerfully than any other means to realize the spirit of religion, by
healing those inveterate disorders which, traced to their real origin,
will be found rooted in an ignorant assumption as to the penurious
severity of Providence, and the consequent greed of selfish men to
confine what seemed as if extorted from it to themselves, or to steal
from each other rather than quietly to enjoy their own.
We shall probably never reach those higher forms containing the true
differences of things, involving the full discovery and correct
expression of their very self or essence. We shall ever fall short of
the most general and most simple nature, the ultimate or most
comprehensive law. Our widest axioms explain many phenomena, but so too
in a degree did the principles or elements of the old philosophers, and
the cycles and epicycles of ancient astronomy. We cannot in any case of
causation assign the whole of the conditions, nor though we may
reproduce them in practice, can we mentally distinguish them all,
without knowing the essences of the things including them; and we
therefore must not unconsciously ascribe that absolute certainty to
axioms, which the ancient religionists did to creeds, nor allow the
mind, which ever strives to insulate itself and its acquisitions, to
forget the nature of the process by which it substituted scientific for
common notions, and so with one as with the other lay the basis of
self-deception by a pedantic and superstitious employment of them.
Doubt, the essential preliminary of all improvement and discovery, must
accompany all the stages of man's onward progress. His intellectual life
is a perpetual beginning, a preparation for a birth. The faculty of
doubting and questioning, without which those of comparison and judgment
would be useless, is itself a divine prerogative of the reason.
Knowledge is always imperfect, or complete only in a prospectively
boundless career, in which discovery multiplies doubt, and doubt leads
on to new discovery. The boast of science is not so much its manifested
results, as its admitted imperfection and capacity of unlimited
progress. The true religious philosophy of an imperfect being is not a
system of creed, but, as Socrates thought, an infinite search or
approximation. Finality is but another name for bewilderment or defeat.
Science gratifies the religious feeling without arresting it, and opens
out the unfathomable mystery of the One Supreme into more explicit and
manageable Forms, which express not indeed His Essence, which is wholly
beyond our reach and higher than our faculties can climb, but His Will,
and so feeds an endless enthusiasm by accumulating forever new objects
of pursuit. We have long experienced that knowledge is profitable, we
are beginning to find out that it is moral, and we shall at last
discover it to be religious.
God and truth are inseparable; a knowledge of God is possession of the
saving oracles of truth. In proportion as the thought and purpose of the
individual are trained to conformity with the rule of right prescribed
by Supreme Intelligence, so far is his happiness promoted, and the
purpose of his existence fulfilled. In this way a new life arises in
him; he is no longer isolated, but is a part of the eternal harmonies
around him. His erring will is directed by the influence of a higher
will, informing and moulding it in the path of his true happiness.
Man's power of apprehending outward truth is a qualified privilege; the
mental like the physical inspiration passing through a diluted medium;
and yet, even when truth, imparted, as it were, by intuition, has been
specious, or at least imperfect, the intoxication of sudden discovery
has ever claimed it as full, infallible, and divine. And while human
weakness needed ever to recur to the pure and perfect source, the
revelations once popularly accepted and valued assumed an independent
substantiality, perpetuating not themselves only, but the whole mass of
derivitive forms accidentally connected with them, and legalized in
their names. The mists of error thickened under the shadows of
prescription, until the free light again broke in upon the night of
ages, redeeming the genuine treasure from the superstition which
obstinately doted on its accessories.
Even to the Barbarian, Nature reveals a mighty power and a wondrous
wisdom, and continually points to God. It is no wonder that men
worshipped the several things of the world. The world of matter is a
revelation of fear to the savage in Northern climes; he trembles at his
deity throned in ice and snow. The lightning, the storm, the earthquake
startle the rude man, and he sees the divine in the extraordinary.
The grand objects of Nature perpetually constrain men to think of their
Author. The Alps are the great altar of Europe; the nocturnal sky has
been to mankind the dome of a temple, starred all over with admonitions
to reverence, trust, and love. The Scriptures for the human race are
writ in earth and Heaven. No organ or miserere touches the heart like
the sonorous swell of the sea or the ocean-wave's immeasurable laugh.
Every year the old world puts on new bridal beauty, and celebrates its
Whit-Sunday, when in the sweet Spring each bush and tree dons reverently
its new glories. Autumn is a long All-Saints' day; and the harvest is
Hallowmass to Mankind. Before the human race marched down from the
slopes of the Himalayas to take possession of Asia, Chaldea, and Egypt,
men marked each annual crisis, the solstices and the equinoxes, and
celebrated religious festivals therein; and even then, and ever since,
the material was and has been the element of communion between man and
God.